The percentage of Americans who attend weekly worship services has fallen sharply over the past 20 years, a new Gallup poll shows.
Thirty percent of respondents said they attend services weekly or “almost every week,” down from 42% who said the same in a 2001-2003 survey, Gallup reported.
Meanwhile, 31% said they never attend worship services in the recent poll.
The Gallup survey results add to a growing collection of data denoting a decline in the importance and practice of religion in daily American life.
In the recent poll, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as Mormons, registered the highest level of weekly/almost weekly worship attendance — 67%.
Comparatively, 30% of Protestants, 28% of Muslims, 23% of Catholics and 16% of Jews said they attend services each week. Additionally, 15% of Orthodox Christians, 12% of Buddhists and 7% of Hindus reported similar attendance patterns.
Those who identified as having no religious affiliation or as atheist/agnostic reported the lowest weekly worship attendance — 2%.
Members of “other” religious groups — which Gallup defined as comprising numbers not large enough to report separately or who “are difficult to categorize based on respondent’s answers” — registered 21% weekly attendance, down from 24% in 2001-2003.
Gallup said the results were largely driven by a lack of religious identification among 18- to 29-year-olds, of whom 35% say they’re religiously unaffiliated, 31% who say they’re Protestant or nondenominational Christian and 19% who identify as Catholic.
Those figures track with a 2023 Gallup survey in which 59% of 18- to 34-year-olds said they believe in God. The pollsters said that number was a prime factor in the decline of overall belief in God from 90% in 2001 to 74% last year.
This month, the Pew Research Center reported that 80% of Americans said religion’s role in public life is failing, with 49% saying the decline is a negative development.
The Gallup poll on U.S. worship attendance was conducted 2021-2023 via telephone interviews in combined surveys. The aggregate sample used to compile results numbered 32,445 adults residing in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The margin of error for the overall sample was plus or minus 1.5 percentage points at a 95% confidence level.